A Blog too far – Goes very far

I have often wondered what it says about me that I so often think I am wrong. There have however been a few times when in some disagreement with my wife that I have known beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was right. At such times I have proudly stood up for myself, demanded a concession, and left no stone unturned in my arrogance … before I was each time proven wrong.

This time though being wrong truly appears to have paid off. You see a few months ago we started a new Blog about projectors. You may have seen my post here where I talked about my fear that we had created a “Blog too far”. Not to be negative, as don’t forget its apparently self confidence that is my main problem…but at the time I could not imagine having the staff or the content to make such a Blog a success.

Well today I am proud to announce I was wrong again!

Our projector blog, which I simply entitled “The Projector Blog” is now number one in Google on the term “Projector Blog”. What exactly is that worth? I don’t really know. But it has to be better than having your blog be search result number 56 on that term.

So you don’t get the wrong idea I will tell you what having your Blog or website being in the number one Google position for your primary search term will do for you. Being number one in Google, for a quality search term, can result in significant traffic. Or at least significantly more traffic than being lower ranked for any given term. Traffic, along with the quality SEO work, and frequent quality content, that most likely got your Blog or website to the number one spot in the first place, will result in Google Page Rank.

In our case the combination of traffic, rank, and a general improved web presence of our Blog gives the commecrial links we have placed their more value. Having created a ranked site with lots of on topic non commercial content we have now added links to our projector rental websites. Websites like www.rentouprojectors.com and www.rentacomputer.com. On these linked websites we help business customer’s source short term projector and audio visual rental equipment that is primarily used for conventions, training classes, sales or marketing presentations, or other special short term events.

So sorry to burst your bubble but just because you found a great website with lots of useful articles that don’t try to do anything but make you better informed… that does not mean the site authors are writing the content out of the kindness of their hart. Could be.. but unlikely.

So if have ever wondered why people create purely informational Blogs there is one reason, of course Google Ads could be another but that’s a topic for another day. Until then be sure to check out our new highly ranked Projector Blog!

Google Loves Freshness

Fall is here again and to our dismay a customers highly diversified approach to marketing has cost them a few positions on the all important Google search output for the term “Plasma Rental“. Fall is of course the prime season for convention and trade shows and a very important time for the customer. A prime product duing this season is AV rentals. That’s Audio Visual rentals of course as in say a Plasma Rental or a Projector Rental.

It’s obvious of course that not many people will be flying into town this fall for the big Webmastersworld’s Search & Internet Marketing Conference at the Las Vega Convention Center with a 50” plasma in their checked baggage.  So this is the time, or more to the point past the time, to get the word out that www.rentacomputer.com offers a full line of AV rentals.

We did make a silly flash video a few months back about a plasma rental, we had some poor stick figure guy taking his own plasma to a trade show at the McCormick Center in Chicago and of course he broke it.

But like I said in the last few months the client has been distracted and had us on other projects. Since they have not asked us to get back to that vertical it has been ignored.  This did give us the chance to remind the client that Google values freshness and if you want to be the number one search result you need to remember to put out the effort with content and links.

So enough crying as of course I need to get back to that little problem.

MMORPG Monitors – Big is Good!

It looks so much better in real life

I imagine it has been about a year ago since I posted about the Dell 24″ LCD we purchased. That old post would have talked about how great Guild Wars looked and how I wished the monitor was mine. Because you see I had bought the monitor for for my wife. Now a year later my wife has somehow managed to get her old PC on that Dell 24″ and her “new” PC has worked it’s way up to the living room and found this Samsung 40″ LCD.

The Samsung 40″ LCD (A series 6 TV using the new 120Hz refresh rate) was of course purchased to be our new living room TV after a recent home remodel. We wanted something that was 1080p yet not so large that it cramped our options when it came to the living room layout.

Well all I can say about that plan is.. FAIL. As a keyboard, mouse, headset, etc hardly leave room for classic living room options. In place of my plan we have this giant TV / computer combo crowding into a space I had imagined would have been used for a small breakfast table.

Enough of this whining and I will deal with my wife later. But for now what I wanted to talk about was how Amazing this Samsung LCD is for computer games.

The set is, as I mentioned before is a 1080p 120Hz model, and the computer is running at a resolution of 1920×1080. The picture above is the best I could do with my little Cannon digital camera. Any blur you see is from the motion of the characters on the screen and my cameras / my inability to find a setting that would work well to capture a clear image of the set. So that blur was not on set, it’s just a camera thing.

So of course with the great looking environment Guild Wars has, as do many MMOPRG games, this big monitor just makes it all look better. Thought MMORPG games are not noted for their high frame rate requirements, and for the most part do not require the latest and greatest video card, at no time did I see anything other than a smooth and great picture while playing Guild Wars.

Even when my wife switched over to Call of Duty 4 the display looked great, again no lag or hint of any reason why this Samsung TV could not easily replace any traditional computer LCD that I have ever used.

A quick FYI about the PC we are using. It’s an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.4GHz and it’s using an Nvidia 8800GTS with 760mb.

And the set itslef is a : Samsung LN40A650 40-Inch 1080p 120Hz LCD HDTV with RED Touch of Color

Click here to see a full size photo of the Samsung 40 Inch and Guild Wars on my Andy Wendt Flickr page.

Link Baiting From a Noob

Well at least I could say that my first attempt at any serious link baiting was fun. I put together a stupid script and Kyle Thompson designed a simple flash using stick figures.

Our angle was based on what could happen if you try to take your own giant plasma display to a trade show. Becasue of course our client www.rentacomputer.com woudl prefer you rent their equipment. This of course does have its merrits but we still enjoyed makeing the video and since the client has the great attitude that almost any new content is good content we knew there would be few rules to worry about.

So the link bait itself atcually comes from the content being a story about a guy that tries to save moeny by doing it himself and destroying his plasma and the title we gave the project which was “How to preserve the life of your plasma TV“.

Anyway if you get a chance watch the video and feel free to tell me how sad it actually was.

But some day when you Google “how to preserve the life of a plasma”, and if not you, then someone else will, remember this stupid post.

: )

The things you see on the internet

Having fallen victim to the occupational mental illness that causes one to enter every thought into Google I was graphically reminded today of the hazards of my malady.

The random thought and word that went into the Google search today was “leads”. Not a word or a search that anyone would expect to be “Not Safe For Work”, but as my dad might say, “Wrong again potato breath”. Ok I can’t really be sure dad ever said “potato breath” because it was something different there at the end each time. But you get the idea.

So anyway the following link is a screen shot of my Google search results for leads and I think I may have to reconsider my previous post about how bad Yahoo is. Just Kidding!

**Update – Despite the opinion of my college Bill Schiering this is not Google learning to return the sort of images I normally search for. That’s funny but not an option. It was also a standard search meaning I expected no images in the result. Finally the result was verified at the time by the rest of the Xponex staff and it is truly Mr Schiering’s loss that his search results for leads, hours removed from my attempt, now return a different set of images.

Tips2008 – What is Yahoo Thinking?

The other day I get this e-mail from my boss. In the e-mail he only says “Go to Yahoo and check out this search result for Computer Rental Tips2008”, which I read several times and wondered to myself if he intended to leave out the space between tips and the date.

Coming to the conclusion that no one would intend to leave out the space I proceeded to Yahoo and did the search with the space. Making it of course “Computer Rental Tips 2008“. The results were what I expected. I would say that about one third of the first 10 results were pages that our marketing company had written. From our Technical Discussion Forum, to our Small Business Magazine, to those content sucking scrape sites, it was nothing that I did not expect to see.

But the next day when my boss was back in his office he asked what I thought of the Yahoo Search, and I replied that it was exactly what I expected. To this he disappointedly answered, “Not with the space, without the space”.

So this Yahoo search interested him, the search of “Computer Rental Tips2008” with no space there at the end, because it returned a complete bunch of garbage. I mean not a single page on that search result was anything but a total SPAM page. So really what he is interested in is why the Yahoo Search Engine did not suggest that space between the word “Tips” and the year “2008”, and secondly why does Yahoo even bother to index the worthless list of results that the above search returned?

Unfortunately neither of us had the answer, but for me at least it did raise one more question, and that is “With a search engine this bad, could a Microsoft purchase do anything but improve the Yahoo product?”

Click here to read more news on the Yahoo / Microsoft story.

House – A Place You Put Your Favorite Technology

Ever stop and think that technology changes the way we think about our own house? Have you yet admitted that George Carlin was right when he said “a house is just a place to put your stuff”? Ever notice that more and more in today’s high tech world that stuff the house is arranged around is computers, large screen displays, projectors, and expensive kitchen appliances?

Having just moved a very nice 52” Sony DLP out of our living room to our basement, because we realized it was just too much of a good thing for that small space, I just realized that almost every room in the house is designed around a certain piece of “technology stuff”.

For example that 52” monster is now in the basement, in a bedroom actually. Of course the bed and the Lazy Boy in the room are sitting in just the right spot to have a great view of the TV set. So when you walk in you of course see a bed, a desk, a chair and an amazingly big TV that is obviously saying to the bed: “I don’t care what they call this room you are just here so that kid can be comfortable when he looks at me!”.

There is one more finished room in the basement and it is at the present time our computer room. There are two high end gaming PC’s set up in there and soon it will hold a third. This room is struggling as my wife finds the basement chilly no matter the time of year. This is a big problem for me as I love my PC and want to spend more time with it. This is another example of how the room is just there for the stuff. Because in this case the stuff is great, but the room is cold, so the room needs to get its act together, get a little warmer, and tell my wife that her stuff misses her.

Having just bought a new shiny stainless steel GE Refrigerator and stove it’s of course obvious that even the kitchen is arranged around these giant machines that are really a sort of “food technology stuff”. Do any amount of kitchen research and you will have to agree that a good layout depends on where that stuff is. Something about a “work triangle”, I don’t know, I just stare at the pictures of all the shiny stuff.

My last thought takes me back to that living room. That one room that now lacks that one piece of technology to give it a purpose. I can’t help but wonder about a ceiling mounted 1080p projector to save space and I have even considered a projector rental to make sure that’s the right choice of stuff for the room. But at this point it’s a toss up between the projector and a smaller HD LCD or Plasma TV.

So the living room stuff is my next project. But it’s also a project that I imagine will never end. For as long as we live in houses we will fill them with stuff, we will obsess over which room is the best choice for which stuff, and what is the best stuff to put in them.

New laptops offered by computer rental vendors.

New laptop technologies are making their way into short term rental inventories of the nations leading technology rental suppliers.

Some new laptop features that are fast approaching commonplace in rental inventory include: Windows Vista, Dual Core Processors, Ultra Portable Laptops, and even one new marketing ploy that has laptops being matched with projectors in a businessman’s special if you will.

Visit this Computer Rental blog to read more about these new laptop trends and other short term technology solutions.

CCTV Cameras – With Live Monitoring

Having already made a few posts about our latest push to fill out our “city pages” for our Security Cameras in Texas. I just realized I had neglected to mention one of the coolest things from Texas that I have seen this week.

This cool thing is a video of an actual materials theft from a construction company. The theft was recorded by a CCTV monitoring firm. Yes a firm that monitors your security cameras in live time. That was of course no random thing as the construction company had contracted with a firm to insure that their CCTV security cameras were monitored in live time.

This live video monitoring works much like a traditional alarm system. When the intruder came over the fence the video monitoring company noticed the crime in progress and called the police. As you will see in the video the thief was caught red handed.

So if you have ever considered having your GeoVision security cameras monitored in live time, in Texas, or anywhere in the country then watch this video and perhaps you can imagine how a live CCTV monitoring service could work for you.

To request a qutoe to have your security cameras monitored you can call www.CameraSecurityNow.com at 877-422-1907

Litterbugs on CCTV in the UK

Ok, if you have read any of my past editorials on CCTV and Crime in the UK you may have picked up on my opinion that the UK has gone to far with their saturation of CCTV cameras across their little island. I have said that they have more cameras than they can afford to monitor. I have said that putting video surveillance in the hands of any government, is by the very nature of government, the most inefficient and at the same time dangerous thing to do. BUT there is a new idea coming out of the UK today that I just can’t help but like.

The likeable idea is using CCTV Security Cameras to fine litterbugs. Because if there is one thing I hate, outside of thugs, drug dealers, etc.. it’s litterbugs. It’s impossible to go anywhere here in the US without watching some one throw a cigarette butt on the ground, a sandwich wrapper out of their car window, or any amount of trash blow out of the bed of a pickup truck driving down the road in front of you.

Not that I have ever had the urge to hug a tree mind you. But the needless and senseless assault on our own communities at the hands of people who are so lazy and stupid that they lack the common sense of a dog who knows by instinct alone not to poop in it’s own cage, is more than I can take.

Apparently the Councils of Bournemouth and Poole will be giving this a try this summer. With their existing CCTV infrastructure, and even the cell phone video of the general public, they hope to catch and fine drivers who throw rubbish from their cars.

Though as one UK Council Leader pointed out: “This government’s law often doesn’t match what’s on the tin, and very often has unintended consequences.” I agree as from my past observations governments often care little about the practical ability to implement or enforce most new laws. That being my theory I am hopeful that trend will continue this time. Because of course I hate litterbugs that much.

So if you share my passion on this then please keep an eye out for any new information on the story. If you find any please stop back and leave me an update. Till then best of luck to my fellow litterbug haters in the UK.